NOVEMBER 22, 1999: If there’s been a better performance in any movie this year than Sarah Polley’s in ‘Guinevere’, well, I haven’t seen it. At risk of sounding too academic, watching Polley in this movie is like a little lesson in movie acting. She’s been one to watch for a while—she first popped up, as far as I know, in Terry Gilliam’s ‘Adventures of Baron Munchausen’ (1989), but I took real notice of her for the first time in Atom Egoyan’s mesmerizing ‘The Sweet Hereafter’(1997). In that film I noticed two things: 1) that she was a dead ringer for a young Uma Thurman; and 2) that she was really, really good.

Hey guess what? I was right. I next saw her in one of my favorite movies of this year, ‘Go’, in which she played a supermarket checkout girl who tries to step in to a complicated drug deal for an out-of-town co-worker and finds herself entirely out of her element. As terrific as that film is, the little moments in Polley’s performance were my favorites: her acid-tongued explanation of where she took off the double coupons; her defiant swig of the beer to William Fichtner’s Burke; the look on her face when she finds X-ed out cohort Manny doing the Macarena; and the freedom of her dancing at the Mary Christmas rave after, she thinks, her problems are over. Now there’s this amazing performance in ‘Guinevere’, and I have to ask: is there a more exciting young actress working today? Sure, I enjoy the work of her ‘Go’ castmate Katie Holmes, or Reese Witherspoon, or Sarah Michelle Geller. But in this new film, Polley shows the heart and soul and weight of a real actress, a full woman, a wisdom and talent far beyond her years. It’s that rich of a performance.

Polley plays a poor little rich girl, twenty years old, entirely unsure of herself and her womanhood, who meets Connie (Stephen Rea), a photographer more than twice her age, at her older sister’s wedding. A visit to his studio to pick up the photos confirms an attraction; before she knows it he’s offering to take her in and tutor her in the artistic discipline of her choice. Soon after she finds out that—shocker—she is not the first woman with whom this bargain has been struck.

The script and direction by Audrey Wells (she wrote the wonderful ‘Truth About Cats & Dogs’) are both first-rate; so often this kind of story is seen through the eyes of the trophy-holding male (or, more often, enormous age gaps like this aren’t even addressed, but accepted as the norm), but Wells tells her story with a clarity and honesty that is spellbinding (in her opening monologue, Polley tells us that he was both the best and the worst man she ever met). The film looks great, taking full advantage of its beautiful San Francisco locales. And there are many fine performances. Rea is top-notch, showing us both the surface charm and the deeply wounded, insecure man inside. Gina Gershon shows up as a painter friend and former ‘student’, who smiles a little and sees a lot. And Jean Smart has many sharp moments as Polley’s mother, including the already legendary scene where she tracks down her daughter, looks Connie right in the eye, and asks ‘What do you have against women your own age?’ And her guess at his answer is a moment so true and so angry that it gives chills.

But as I’ve made clear, the show belongs to Polley. In one scene, about halfway through the film, the Smart character tries to liven up a bland, boring family dinner with a fortune cookie party game, which quickly degenerates into an open wound of family resentments. Watch for how Polley, with perfect timing, absolutely takes the air out of her family. Watch how she reacts to her mother’s rant to her lover. Watch how she handles the scene in the car, late in the movie, when she finds out exactly how much of a liar and a failure Connie is. And watch her full maturity, in the final scenes of the film, when she returns for an impromptu reunion of his students.

Now compare that scene to the one early in the film when Rea first propositions her. They sit in his apartment, flirting lightly, but the moment things get heavy, watch as Polley first tries to disappear into her own skin, then has to get up and lightly scamper over to a nearby table and face away from him, lest she burst out laughing. As she runs her fingers over the tabletop and tries to clear her head, I realized that I had never seen a more vivid portrait of the giggly nervousness of a young woman—so many teen actresses seem to approach sexuality with the cool bravado of a 26-year old (which, actually, they often are) that it’s exhilarating to see an actress brave enough to try and capture that. She looks just a little silly, honestly. So do we all. This performance is what good acting is all about.